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For those of you non-DC-area residents: The Silver Spring Transit Center is a bus terminal in a DC suburb. It was supposed to be built by the county and run by Metro, but when it was completed, it turned out to be so poorly built that Metro refused to take it. So it’s been standing empty for years while the county tries to fix it up and get their money back from the architect and contractors.

And the memory is kept alive in Boston — their metro tickets are called “Charlie cards.” And yes, a cartoonist for the Washington Post can do cartoons about Washington, just as the New York Times can publish editorials about New York. No other newspaper has to pick it up, and no one reading it on a web site has to spend more than five seconds looking at it while heading to “Wit of the World.”

I lived for a while in Vienna, Austria. There, the public transit system of subways, street cars, and buses is clean, cheap, safe, and integrated so that it is pretty easy to get from any part of town to every other part of town. As a tourist there at Christmas, I bought a single one-week pass, and for the price of a New York taxi ride from the airport into town, I traveled everywhere I wanted without a hassle. There are few turnstiles or ticket checkers, and the whole system is pretty efficient. Being Americans we had a car when we lived there, but we had no reason to take it out of the garage unless we left the city, and realized we would have been better off without it. (The trains are great, too.)

This is possible because freeloading is a misdemeanor. Inspectors periodically check to see if you have a valid ticket, if you don’t you pay a fine. The fines go up with repeated violations. So you can ride for free if you don’t mind chancing a fine. Thus if you find yourself stuck in the boonies at night without any money or any other way to get home, it is worth the risk. If you freeload often however, you’ll eventually get caught. And the Austrians are law-abiding folks, on the whole, and frown at freeloaders.

Berlin is a much bigger city, so the system is a lot more complicated, and can be more time consuming, but still puts to shame any system I have seen in the U.S.

In this country, we cater to the few rather than the many, and consider public transportation as existing only to move people who don’t matter very much, and threat them accordingly. We don’t take pride in out public institutions, and aren’t willing to spend the money necessary to really make them work. Or so it seems.

Why do you think we, who are so much richer as a nation, can’t or won’t provide for ourselves public institutions as good as European ones?

Has the DC Metro Mafia put out a hit on Toles yet? He certainly spends lots of time pointing out its flaws. I find it interesting, but I must say, his national interest toons are so good, I yawn when I see the DC Metro themed ones.

About Tom Toles

With his singular style, Tom Toles tackles the complex issues of the day. This Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist skillfully targets political, economic and social concerns — in particular complicated environmental issues — with a clear-eyed precision that hits the mark every time.